Tayyip Erdoğan and Christopher Columbus

After 12 years in power, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan by now has established a good record of initiating unexpected controversies. Last week, he ignited yet another one, which went globally viral, by claiming, “Muslims discovered America, not Christopher Columbus.”

While speaking to an audience of Latin American Muslims, apparently with the intention of establishing the deep roots of Islam in the New World, Erdoğan claimed: “Muslim sailors arrived in America in 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast.”

He did not unveil the sources of his claim, but those who did a Google search found out that it was probably a short online article by Muslim historian Youssef Mroueh. In that 1996 piece, Mroueh refers to some records of medieval Muslims’ expeditions to the West, which could perhaps have gone as far as the Americas. But the “mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast” that Mroueh quoted from Columbus, and to which Erdoğan referred, seems to be a misquotation. In that quote, which is available online, Columbus does not write about a mosque. He writes about “beautiful mountains ... one of them containing on its summit a protuberance in the form of a handsome mosque.” In other words, he just likens the shape of a hill to a mosque.

What this means is that, first, Erdoğan’s advisor who gave him this note about Columbus did not do a good job. A reference that can be found just with a simple Internet search, but can also be checked and refuted by an additional Internet search is not the sign of meticulous speech writing.

In fact, had Erdoğan really been willing to advance an argument for a possible Muslim discovery of the Americas before Columbus, he could have referred...